


(Won’t let you be) Consumed by the flame

by Des98



Category: MCU, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: A little angst, BAMF Loki, Fluff, Gen, Genderfluid Loki, Hurt/Comfort, Loki - Freeform, Loki Helason, Loki Is Good, Loki is awesome, Loki was mind controlled, Torture, Whump, but seriously if you like self indulgent loki fic i think you’ll like this, okay more than a little, you’ve been warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 09:58:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18569062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Des98/pseuds/Des98
Summary: Thor’s witnessed Loki get hurt too many times. He won’t let it happen again, even to the detriment of those around them.Loki knows his brother’s fear for him is causing him pain. He won’t let him be consumed by it, no matter what happens.





	(Won’t let you be) Consumed by the flame

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, I know it’s been a while, but I have major writers block and my adhd is going crazy. I actually wrote this a while back as a self-indulgent fic and vascilated on posting it, but Lily said she likes it and honestly I’m just hoping the act of actually posting something will spark some creativity and motivation and some sort of coherent thought process that isn’t all over the place. Y’all deserve better than my flakiness, and I’m sorry, but for those of you who like Marvel, hope you like this. It’s not that good, really, like I said, mostly self-indulgent. Uh, anyway.... title is from a Hozier lyric because I suck at titles.  
> Y’all are the best. Love,  
> Des

    Tony Stark was a good man, and, in the cases where it really mattered, a highly reasonable one.  Which is why he hated the idea that their best chance for defeating a big purple bastard bent on annihilating half the universe rested on an Asgardian teenager (or, the Asgardian equivalent of a teenager, who just so happened to be centuries older than the rest of them).  And yeah, when Thor showed up with a retinue made up of what remained of the Asgardian people, including his crazy-ass little brother (not to mention his missing science bro), he’d been spitting mad, at first. But then he’d noticed something.

    “Reindeer games!” He’d exclaimed loudly.  “Your eyes are green!”

    “Astute observation, Stark,” Loki had remarked drily.

    “They were blue, though, during the invasion.”

    “Oh, were they?” Loki replied sarcastically.  “I didn’t notice- I was a bit busy, at the time.”  

    “Loki, enough of your quips,” Thor had sighed in exasperation.  “It is time that we prove to the Midgardians that you bear them no ill-will anymore.”

    “They won’t believe me, at any rate,” Loki sighed, before seeming to realize what his brother meant to do.

    “Thor, you don’t want this,” he pleaded, eyes shooting back and forth between Val, advancing on him with dragon fang, and his brother, who was looking at him with a steely determination.  

    “What?  What’s going on here?” Banner asked, looking at the rest of his team.

    “Dragon fang has the power to force the truth out of a person, when wielded by a Valkyrie,” Thor explained, as Val came up behind Loki, putting him in a choke-hold with her blade at his throat.  He didn’t try to stop her, resigned to his fate and knowing that, good as he was, she had almost two-thousand years on him and was also capable of taking down Thor, so he had no chance to escape.  He only resented what the interrogation would reveal, and the harm it would do to his poor brother. He was not stupid enough to hope that he would have the kind of luck that would allow him to avoid the topic.

    “You don’t intend the Midgardians any harm, do you?” Val asked gruffly, and Loki was forced to respond by the ancient magic of the blade.

    “No,” he sighed.

    “You need to be more specific,” Clint piped up, face set angrily.  “He’s a hell of a crafty bastard. Ask him who he DOES intend to harm.”

    Val rolled her eyes, highly doubting that Loki really had a grudge for anyone.  For all his blustering, he was really just an overly-dramatic trickster with a heart secretly far too soft for his own good. She’d seen him on the Statesman, making illusions for the children and calming their people- not exactly the actions of an evil mastermind.  But no, Hela’s lost child was just a dramatic theatre goth (and she’d known that too, immediately, and with a certainty that took her breath away. She’d know their old commander’s magic anywhere, especially when she laid eyes on the _reason_ that Hela had managed to escape her prison and slay all her sisters in a grieving mother’s wrath.  But she wasn’t about to tell Loki that his ‘sister’ was actually his mother, and that the real reason that she’d lost what little sanity she’d possessed leading up to her banishment was that Odin had ripped her half-Jotun baby from her, giving it to its father, Laufey.  How Loki had ended up in Odin’s hands after all was a mystery to her, but she wasn’t about to ask. The old bastard’s motives and plans always gave her a splitting headache).

    “Loki,” she said, pulling herself out of her ramblings, “Do you intend harm upon anyone?”

    “Yes,” he snarled, so violently and with such venom in his eyes that it startled all the mortals into raising their weapons.  “I will see Thanos torn to the ground and drowned in a river of his own poisonous blood for the things he forced me to do, the horror he has inflicted upon the realms.”

    The mention of the Mad Titan nearly caused Val to drop the sword- she thought that he’d been banished, powerless, by Bor long before her time. That he still lived and, apparently, had somehow managed to gather enough power to detain Loki boded ill for them all.

    “He lives?!” She asked, horrified, before a hint of sympathy crept into her voice against her will.  “Oh Lackey, what did he do to you?”

    Loki sighed- as he’d feared, this was not going his way, and he had no choice but to spill his secrets.  “He found me as I fell through the Void, took me in, tried to make me one of his ‘children.’ He knew me, somehow, as a Skywalker, and he wanted me to go to Midgard to retrieve the tesseract for him.  When I told him no, he had his underlings torture me mercilessly, hoping to weaken my mind. The Chitauri pulled my rib cage out of my back before shoving it back in the wrong way; they burned me repeatedly with acid, cut off my toes and forced me to grow them back with my weakened seidr just so they could do it again.  They dipped a whip in molten lead and beat me with it, again and again. They gave me no food or water for a year, until I was finally weak enough that the protections on my mind had fallen. I am unsure how I didn’t die; Norn’s know I wanted to. The only blessing I had is that my body didn’t decide to shift to female any time during the whole process, or they would have no doubt gotten me pregnant to further force compliance. They forced the mind stone upon me, shattered my mind again and again and again, day after day, and put it back together wrong so I was filled with hatred and bitterness, a shadow of what I once was and with every good memory ripped away and locked where I could never hope to find it.  Then they sent me after the tesseract. It was all I could do to fail.”

    Halfway through the explanation, Tony had covered Peter’s ears in horror, and Clint had dropped his bow in shock and revulsion.  They… this was depravity in its most twisted form. Val had no doubt that Loki _had_ died during the process at least once- as Hela’s child, he just couldn’t _stay_ dead, although being half-frost giant meant he could die temporarily, at least- but Loki in his weakened state would have assumed it to just be blessed unconsciousness.  Once Thanos and his soldiers found out that Loki could resurrect, well… they only would have used that to further increase the horror of the tortures they could inflict.

    That conversation had been highly unpleasant, not least the revelation that Thanos had used an infinity stone to attack Midgard, and Loki’s surety that he would soon come for the realm again, determined to achieve his goal of getting the gauntlet, especially now that the realm eternal was gone.  And then there had been further news.

    “I Astral projected about a week ago, looking in on him.  He can sense my presence, so it was… difficult, to say the least,” he sighed, Dragon Fang forcing his honesty.  “I… he has somehow figured out how to inflict damage upon my astral form, and I barely managed to escape alive.”  He lifted his tunic top to show a gaping, weeping wound on his stomach, and Thor gasped.

    “Brother, you have been hiding such a thing from me for days, when you clearly need medical attention!  How could you?”

    “We had very little medicine aboard the ship, and others need it more.  I could not have you forcing it upon me,” Loki murmured, his cheeks heating at the forced confession, this evidence of his hidden goodness.

    “Valkyrie, set him down- that is enough of this madness.  He needs medical care. Friend Bruce!” He made to forcibly remove his brother to the couch, but Loki batted his hands away.

    “Later,” he scolded, using a spell to freeze Thor in place.  “I am not finished- I discovered that Thanos has the power stone, after he stole it and killed half of Xandar.  He is a great threat, and I fear he comes for us sooner, rather than later.”

    “Why’s that?” Natasha asked, her expression tightening just a bit, the only sign of fear penetrating her stone mask.

    “There are three infinity stones on earth (there had been, somewhere along the line, an explanation of infinity stones, although Loki was too tired to really remember where in his forced confessions it had fallen).”

    “Three?” Thor asked, blanching.

    “Yes, three,” Loki sighed.  “The mortals have been foolish enough to place Mind in their android.”  He motioned to Vision. “And I can sense Time in this very city. It is with the false wizard who managed to surprise me the last time we were here.  I would have taken it from him if we had more time. His protections are abysmal.”

    “Strange has one of these stone thingies?” Tony muttered, thinking over the implications.  He’d heard, of course, about the famous neurosurgeon turning into a weird magic hermit on Bleeker Street, but it hadn’t really seemed a huge issue at the time- something that had changed, obviously.  “But wait- you said three.”

    “Excellent counting, Stark- befitting of a genius, really,” Loki quipped, but it was half-hearted.  “But yes- the third is here as well. It was on Asgard, but with the realm’s destruction, I could not leave it to float in space, ripe for the taking.”  Quickly, he made a lazy hand motion, and the tesseract appeared out of thin air for just a moment before Loki put it away again.

    “The… you have the tesseract,” Bruce muttered, looking at him a bit disapprovingly- not for taking it, of course, but for not telling the rest of them.

    “Unfortunately, yes,” Loki exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose.  “If there was any other way, I wouldn’t have taken it. But fortunately, Thanos cannot reach it if it is in my pocket dimension, and I have no plans of giving it up.  But if he manages to retake the mind stone, he could force me to. Which is why, should he get ahold of the android, I will need you to kill me, effectively cutting the tesseract out of his reach forever.”

    “Brother, NO!” Thor cried, clutching his shoulders and holding him as close as the wound on his torso would allow without hurting him.  “We will do no such thing!”

    “He’s right, Reindeer Games.  As unlikely as I would have thought it, you’re part of our team now, and we’re not gonna hurt you.”  

    “We don’t trade lives,” Steve added.  In another world, the mere presence of Steve might have annoyed Tony.  Luckily, in this timeline, the team had gotten their shit together before the so-called ‘Civil War’ could get too out of hand, and he was glad to have the Capsicle agree with him on this.

    “It doesn’t matter what you _want,”_ Loki had hissed at them.  “This is for the sake of the universe!”

    “Well too bad,” Valkyrie finally put in.  “Because you can’t die anyway.”

    “I realise that I have had the extreme misfortune of living to suffer such unfortunate situations thus far, dear Val, but I am _not_ immortal,” Loki spat back.

    “Ugh, I need a drink,” Val swore.  “But it’s true- you can’t die. I didn’t plan on telling you this, but here we go…”.

    This wasn’t really the _ideal_ situation for Loki to find out that his secret sister was actually his birth mother.  But really, when did things _ever_ go his way?

    __________

    It had been a rough couple of weeks for everyone, most especially Loki, which is why he thanked the Norns for Peter Parker.  The fellow teenager had spent the past couple of weeks in between strategy meetings and the constant check-ups on Loki’s health that Thor insisted Bruce carry out teaching Loki all about memes and vines, being absolutely fascinated by his magic, and complaining about cis and straight people with him/her.  They’d also taken advantage of Loki’s newfound immortality to do numerous dangerous and stupid things in the name of science, leading Tony and Thor to have dangerously high levels of anxiety (but really, they’d only driven a shopping cart off the roof of the compound _one time_ , so the adults were being ridiculous, in their opinions).

    Which led to their newest scheme.  Loki- female today- was wearing a long green dress and rocking a killer smoky eye and dark lipstick, holding two magically-created fake IDs.

    “Might as well face the end of the world with style,” she was cajoling Peter, trying to convince him to go clubbing with her that evening.  “Really, you have a super metabolism and I’m a goddess, so it’s not like we can really get more than pleasantly buzzed off Midgardian alcohol, now is it?”

    “Look, I’d really love to, but I have a Spanish test tomorrow,” Peter mumbled, looking down at his textbook, where he’d been frantically studying conjugation tables when Loki had suddenly teleported into his bedroom in Queens.

    “No problem- I’ll take it for you.  I speak over two hundred languages in addition to the Allspeak, and Spanish just so happens to be one of them.”

    “Loki, you cannot shapeshift into me and take my Spanish test,” Peter reprimanded.  “It’s wrong.”

    “So is subjugating Midgard, and yet you’re still friends with me,” Loki reminded him.

    “Yeah, but _that_ wasn’t your fault.  I can’t let you cheat for me.”

    “Ugh, you’re no fun,” she grumbled, but relented.  “Come on though, let’s at least study at the compound.  I already left a note for May saying I’d return you tomorrow.”

    “How is it that you can get her to agree to anything?” Peter sighed, gathering up his books and accepting that Loki wouldn’t take no for an answer.

    “Same way I can get Barton to let me shoot with his precious bow and eat his pizza,” she boasted.  “I’ve had a thousand years to practice my puppy eyes.”

_________

    They’d only been at the compound for an hour before disaster struck.  Loki was reading a book next to Peter, occasionally answering his questions about his study guide, when a bright orange ship landed outside the window.

    “Not another fucking spaceship,” Tony groaned from the living room couch, getting up wearily and pressing the reactor on his chest to release the nanoparticles of the Ironman suit.  “Hey Lokes, do you know if this is a hostile?”

    “It’s not one of _his,_ if that’s what you’re asking,” she responded tiredly, shutting the book with a _snap._ “But that doesn’t mean it won’t try to kill us.”

    “Alright guys, Assemble,” Cap called, wishing for just one relaxing afternoon of fucking the daylights out of Bucky without interruptions.  

    “Heeey, don’t shoot!” A short-ish, stocky man with ginger hair and a beard replied, stepping out of the cockpit.  “We come in peace- heard you were trying to take down old purple nutsack-chin. We wanna help.”

    And then an actual fucking _talking raccoon_ stepped out of the ship, looking irritatedly at the man.  “Where’s your fucking manners?” He asked. “You didn’t even introduce us properly.”  He turned to the Avengers.

    “Hi,” he said, as if all this were normal, sticking out his furry paw.  “We’re the Guardians of the Galaxy.”

    “Charmed,” Loki extended a hand, delicately probing the mind of the man, the raccoon, and then the large alien that came out next, who apparently called himself Drax the Destroyer.  It made her want to roll her eyes- she and Thor had been taking out tougher beings than him since they could barely walk.

    And then came a Floral Colossus, quite young by the looks of things.  Loki found herself _actually_ charmed as the little creature stuck out a branch with an ‘I am Groot.’

    “I am Groot,” she responded in kind.  “I am Groot; I _am_ Groot, I **am** **_Groot._ ** _”_ (Hi, I’m Loki.  You’re clearly the best of the lot, not bickering like a savage.)

    “Loki,” Thor chastised.  “Be polite.”

    “Uh, what the hell is going on here?” Steve asked, grumpy and horny.

    “Language,” the rest of them replied reflexively, even Hulk.

    “Oh, this is Groot.  He speaks Groot, a tonal language made up of only three words.  Thor and I took it when we were younger. So, is this all of your team?” She continued, turning to the guardians.

    “Nah, we still got a couple in there,” the man who called himself Star Lord responded.  “Oh, here comes Mantis.”

    Mantis immediately flinched upon setting eyes on Loki.  “Ahhhh!” She cried, immediately tearing up, her large black eyes overflowing.  “So much pain; I can feel it without even touching you! That has never happened before.  Please do not come any closer, or I might die.”

    “Well, this is going splendidly,” the goddess of mischief huffed, fuming at the looks of pity her team shot her, and horror from the rest of the Guardians.  Or… not the rest, as two more figures were emerging from the ship.

    Oh fuck… she was screwed.  She was absolutely screwed.  Why could nothing in her life work out?!

    “Loki?!” Quill knew something was wrong when Gamora’s usual stoic facade gave way to shock.  The blue cybernetic beside her wore a similar expression. “How the hell are you even alive? I thought my father would have found you by now!”

    “Your father?” Thor’s voice trailed off, but as he looked between the two sisters and Loki’s resigned, worried expression, he connected the dots.

    “YOU ARE THE CHILDREN OF THAT MONSTROSITY?!” He boomed, his single eye dangerous as thunder started to rumble in the distance.  “IT IS BECAUSE OF YOU AND YOUR KIND THAT MY SWEET SIBLING HAS SUFFERED SO?!”

    Loki sprang into action as Thor advanced on the team, pulling her brother’s arm back.  “No, no, Thor- don’t! Look, Gamora was nice to me- she snuck me water once, and she was never as brutal as the others.  I could sense her loyalties wavering; please, you cannot kill potential allies!”

    “THEY ARE NOT ALLIES!” The thunderer objected, angrier than his team had ever seen him, and Valkyrie flinched.  Even when Hela destroyed their home, she hadn’t seen him like this- pure, unadulterated _rage._ This, this was frightening, even for her.  She knew that she couldn’t hope to hold him off right now, not when he was calling upon all the power of his godly birthright and directing it at the two in front of him.  If they couldn’t do something, the entire compound- possibly the entire _state-_ could be caught in the crossfire.  

    Loki (whose gender had shifted back to male in the middle of all this) threw himself in front of the two, his seidr shimmering as he created a green shield to cover all the mortals and the few Asgardians who were present to see their king going into a berserker state.

    “Thor, I need you to take a deep breath,” he instructed his brother.  “It is alright; I am here. I am alive. These people are our friends; they were just stolen orphans, with as much cause to hate Thanos as any of us.  You need not hurt them; it will accomplish nothing. It will not ease this pain you feel.”

    “I DO NOT CARE!” Thor screamed, his anguish filling the sky as the wind began to pick up, lighting flashing around them as a tree fell on the edge of the property.  “THEY HURT YOU, LOKI- THEY TOOK THE SKIN OFF YOUR BACK AND PUT FEAR AND ANGUISH IN YOUR HEART, AND THEY MUST **PAY!** ”

    Hulk rushed forward to try to incapacitate Thor, but Loki’s magic held him in place with a wave of his hand.

    “You have no hope in this, Hulk,” he warned the large green man.  “Everyone stay where you are.”

    They did not need to be told twice, and Tony and his team watched in absolute fascination as Thor’s lighting pounded repeatedly against Loki’s shield to no affect, and seemingly without much effort on Loki’s part.  He had realized before, of course, that Loki had held back during the invasion of New York, but seeing him in action here, his power easily rivaling Thor even as he brought down everything he had, was a terrifyingly surreal experience and it struck him (pun intended) that Loki, for all that he might look frailer and be a good half a century younger, was nonetheless just as much of a warrior as his brother, and with magic and a soul forged and made stronger by unimaginable trials to boot.

    With Loki’s magic keeping his former tormentors (and the rest of them) safe, the compound felt the full force of Thor’s fury.  Unwilling to incapacitate his beloved brother in order to have a shot at Gamora and Nebula, his power lashed out, tearing down the building from all sides as wind howled and rain lashed down and electricity sizzled in the very air.  Loki simply waited it out, knowing he had no chance of reaching his brother when he was in this state. Trees flew by, hitting the shield and rebounding harmlessly away as dirt and clumps of grass formed a cyclone around them. Millions of dollars in damage, done in seconds as the god’s anger destroyed their home and lightning arched off of his armor and filled his one good eye with a blinding white light.  It could have been minutes or hours (it felt like years, truly) before the storm began to gradually die down, and eventually Loki stepped forward and, in an uncharacteristic public display of affection, wrapped his arms around his brother, who had slumped to the sodden ground, wailing like a wounded animal.

    “It will be alright, Thor,” Loki soothed, murmuring the words into his brother’s shorn hair and knowing that this had been simply the culmination of all the events of the past few months coming to a head, his grief for his only remaining family pushing him far past the edge in the way nothing else could.  “The sun will shine on us again, brother. Of this I assure you.”


End file.
